All Hail Ed Meese!

For the symposium on Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum's new book, The Company They Keep: How Partisan Divisions Came to the Supreme Court (Oxford University Press, 2019).Devins and Baum's The Company They Keep is a fine book that nevertheless manages to bury the lede. In order not to make the same mistake, I will state the theme of this review in the first paragraph. What Devins and Baum actually show—in spite of themselves—is how social movements change the Constitution. Moreover, the hero of the book is Ronald Reagan's second Attorney General, Edwin Meese, who does not even make an appearance until Chapter Three. Now that's burying the lede!In one respect The Company They Keep is an extended application of the central argument in Baum's 2006 book, Judges and Their Audiences, which is one of the most important—and also one of the most neglected—recent contributions to the literature on judicial decisionmaking.  In…

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